Scarborough: A Computer Would Conclude Trump ‘Admires Autocrats’

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” co-host Joe Scarborough responded to President Trump’s comments about North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un and China’s Xi Jinping by stating a computer program would conclude beyond “a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump admires autocrats.”

Scarborough said, “[H]ow revealing that Donald Trump praises President Xi and says he’s an ‘incredible guy.’ Because he’s able to be president for life. And how incredible that he calls the most tyrannical dictator on the globe, the most cruel dictator on the globe, a great guy, and then defends him and says, well, you’ve got to do what you got to do. We kill a lot of people too. And as I heard that…everybody else on set had to go back to that interview we had with Donald Trump in December 2015, three months before the first Republican primary, where we had to press him on continuing to praise Vladimir Putin, and could not get him to criticize Putin, for assassinating political rivals and killing journalists that he didn’t like.”

After playing a clip from the December 2015 interview, Scarborough added, “America knows this now, members of Donald Trump’s political cult know, that he admires tyrants. He admires strongmen. What was so striking yesterday though, was who Donald Trump considered to be America’s greatest friends and who Donald Trump considered to be America’s greatest enemies. America’s greatest friends, China and North Korea. America’s greatest enemy, and Donald Trump said it himself, the free press is America’s biggest enemy.”

Scarborough further stated that if you compared Trump’s statements about dictators to statements he’s made about democratic institutions, “You just put that into a computer program, you don’t need a Republican or a Democrat or a journalist to come to a conclusion. It would conclude beyond a shadow — a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump admires autocrats.”